After being away from the hobby I needed to refresh some things and went to look at my old bookmarks to find that some of those sites where no longer around and that the forum where I used to dwell is also pretty inactive. So in a quest for information and inspiration I set out, searching for new resources and like-minded people.

Ans I found two (and half) great web pages.

The first one is the end all, of gunpla tutorials, a reddit post aptly named the big list of gunpla tutorials & resources. This massive beast of links (some broken but most up and running), has a little lot of everything, from the most basic to the most advanced techniques.

But my favorite has to be, the Gundam Eclipse Forums which has a great and active community, and is a sure way to get you inspired and motivated to keep improving on your gunplaing (just made that up).

As for my own gunplaing, I’m almost finished with the body assembly of the Real Grade RX 78-2, and in the process of test fitting the HG AGE-2 and will be posting some progress reports, on those two kits soon, so stay tuned.

After a very long time in progress the no grade 1/100 Astray Blue Frame Second L from a Gundam Seed side-story is finally complete. Don’t have much else to add from what I already written in previous posts, so all that is left is to show his complete form.

This guy has been far too long in progress so lets give an update on its adventures.

Getting Blue

This guy is a looker, even though the meanwhile released master grade version, is a considerable improvement this version is not a total slouch, being that its main problems in the looks department are, in my opinion its proportions.

As you can see in the Snap Review I did previously this kit doesn’t lack detail, but it does have some parts (allot) moulded in the wrong colour and that, needs to be corrected.

There was a considerable amount of tough masking to get this guy right, just check how it looks in a first phase of painting his fingers.

Masking this was a challenge.

And since absurd amounts of masking weren’t enough I had to make it even more interesting by losing the piece for the eye and had to scratch build a replacement.

Well, I wouldn’t call it quite a scratch built part, but I cut the eyes sticker to serve as a template put them on some pla plate and trimmed to size. Then it as a matter of sticking the pieces in place and filling the space with a bit of putty.

I can see again !!

I also tried paint the sensors by hand with some silver and clear green but that didn’t go as well as I expected. I have to get an alternative method to get better results. If anyone has advice please, I would appreciate it very much.

Now with a stylish hat

With the body assembled painted and detailed, now all that is left is to wait for the first opportunity to top coat it. I’m planning on top coating with semi gloss clear, so its final paint job look won’t be much different from what you can see in these pictures, but stay tuned and tell me what you think.

Even though I dedicate my modelling to gundam and related, I was curious about Kotobukiya’s Armored Core line and decided to get the White Glint to see what the fuss is about. Unfortunately since I built this during the time this blog was dead I didn’t record the process so that I could show here the box and some of the most interesting aspects of the plates themselves, so you will have to believe me when I say that it’s a pretty sizeable box that is packed full of plates.

The first impression is that, yes, true to his name, there is a whole lot of white. There are also a ton of small parts, and browsing the manual, it becomes pretty obvious that this is a moderately complex build.

And so it was, but it’s complexity and number of parts where not in vain, since it is very detailed, but with a huge problem. It is really way too white. Now it may look silly since this IS the White Glint but anyone expecting to have this looking good out of the box, you can pretty much forget about it, as it won’t happen.

Just take a look at all that whiteness.

So much white !

Though my original plan for this guy was to use it just to see how the kit would look snapped, something had to be done about this.

Then I glance to a set of real touch markers that a bought a few years ago and used in some of the lining of the Infinite Justice. Not only was I pretty happy with them for lining but many people claimed they where also pretty acceptable for shading, so I decided to give them a go.

Definitely a step in the right direction

In the above picture you can see an arm just snapped and bellow the other arm with some detailing, courtesy of the real touch marker grey 2

This kit has so much detail and looks so damn good, but if you don’t put some work into bring out all that goodness it will come out as a pretty plain white robot with big guns (doesn’t sound so bad when you put it that way) .

The legs are full of win

After all the retouching there was still something missing, but for now I would just go on to snap everything together and prepare it for the final top coat.

In the next post he will finally appear in his final form, so stay tuned.

Indeed, after years of inactivity, I resurrected this blog and cleaned it up a bit. No longer will it be a generalist blog as before but it will now be 100% dedicated to my model kit building hobby.

In this time, I have not dedicated much time to my models, due to this or that stepping in the way, but I plan to make a good dent on the huge to do pile of kits that I collected over the years, starting now.

Although not much, my model building was not completely in stasis, having recently finished the long in progress, Astray Blue Frame and the White Glint, from Kotobukiya’s Armored Core line. I’m also currently assembling the original Gundam, RX 78-2 in its real grade form, and I must say, that it’s awesome.

I’ll be posting WIP posts for both the Blue Frame and White Glint before I show their completed forms, but for now I’ll be leaving a couple of teaser pictures: